


I Just Want to Go Home

by SoManySkeletons



Category: Fallout 4, Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Use, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Polyamory, Polygamy, Slow Burn, i will fight todd howard in a denny's parking lot under the light of the blood moon, i'm gonna be real with y'all i have no gd idea how to tag, sort of..., we're talking REAL SLOW yall
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2018-11-09 08:18:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11100612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoManySkeletons/pseuds/SoManySkeletons
Summary: The bombs fall, and Danny claws her way out of the pod and the vault, burning her husband’s corpse as the sunlight burns her eyes. The world is ugly and yellow, like an old photograph, but Danny?She’s burning red, and she’s angry.now in Third Person





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and we're back, updated, and ready to start afresh  
> also i think i figured out the html for hover text so..... that's pretty chill  
> translations are in the end of chapter notes anyways tho for mobile users

 

It’s a beautiful morning.

Danny wakes to the sunlight peeking through the gaps in the curtain, the morning breeze wafting birdsong through the open window, and the baby crying in the next room.

“The baby’s awake,” Ellie mutters from her right in A'yute', his face still buried in the pillow when she turns, squinting, to look at him.

“Thank you, Mr. Obvious. Would you like to report on the condition of anything else?”

Ellie is quiet for a moment, then lifts his face from the pillow to reply. His gray hair sticks out at wild angles, and the fabric has left a pattern of indentations on his dark face.

“Yeah. Bed’s real comfy.”

He grins sleepily, then lets his face drop back down to the pillow.

“Ki’ve, go change the baby. It’s your turn.”

Ellie snorts and then laughs, tossing an arm over Danny’s waist and pulling her closer. She turns, pressing her back to his chest, and he maneuvers his face through her thick, auburn hair to presses kisses to the back of her neck.

Penn is still asleep on the other side of the bed. His long, black hair escaped the braid he put it in last night and now covers his angular brown face, one closed eye and the corner of his lips visible through the tangled mess.

A stiffer breeze than the last pushes the curtains open enough to bathe the room in light, illuminating the simple, basic furniture of the rental home. An upholstered red armchair, two maple dressers, a bed that was almost not big enough for the three of them. It’s not what Danny would have chosen, but it’s only a rental, and they’ll only be here for a week.

Children’s laughter can be heard from outside on the quiet suburban street, and Penn stirs on the other side of the bed, brushing his hair from his face and propping himself up on his elbows.

“Whose turn is it?” he mutters, without opening his eyes.

“Uh... yours,” Ellie says.

“... Try again,” Penn responds, and Danny huffs out a quiet laugh.

“Eh, it was worth a shot,” Ellie mutters, rolling out of bed and shuffling into his slippers.

“Who knows? One of these days that might actually _work_ ,” Danny says teasingly, and Ellie chuckles as he heads out into the hallway, the door clicking shut behind him.

Penn settles back down onto the mattress and Danny scoots over to him, laying an arm over his chest and tucking her head into the join between his neck and shoulder with a contented sigh.

After a moment, she suddenly lifts her head.

“... Wait, it really _is_ your turn,” Danny says, and Penn laughs.

 

“Your coffee, Miss Danny.”

“Thank you, Codsworth,” Danny replies, and Codsworth rumbles off down the hall towards the bedrooms to make beds and tidy things.

“I can’t believe you let Alekzei buy you that robot. It’s so.... American,” Ari says in their native language from her place on the couch, Shaun tucked against her chest in a post-breakfast nap. Her short, dyed-green hair is somehow already styled and her makeup done and flawless, despite Ari having been awake for maybe ten minutes.

“ _I_ can’t believe I let Ellie talk me into bringing him on this _trip_.”

Ari laughs, adjusting Shaun’s blanket, and Danny shrugs.

“But I couldn’t say no to such a big gift. Especially from my father-in-law.” She takes another sip of her coffee and swallows, glancing down at the dark liquid and raising her eyebrows. “... He’s growing on me. This is _really_ good coffee.”

Ari smiles and shakes her head.

“Hypocrite.”

A staccato knock on the door interrupts her in the midst of another drink, and she turns her head and looks out through the small window without moving. The person outside is too short to be seen through the window, but she can see a hat.

“... Who in God’s name is that?”

As Ari and Danny look at the door, Ellie and Penn enter through the door that leads to the carport, each carrying one of the remaining bags in from the car.

The knocking sounds again, and Ari breaks the silence.

“Aren’t you gonna answer?”

Danny sighs, downs the rest of her coffee, sets the mug on the counter, and does.

Outside, underneath the hat, stands a short, white man with brown hair in a yellow coat emblazoned with the words VAULT-TEC on the left breast. Beside him stands a man with darker skin and black hair in an American military officer’s uniform with flip-up sunglasses.

“Good morning, High Chief Sangster. I am Lieutenant General Dale Grimes of the United States Army.” His accent is American, like his uniform, with some regional twang that Danny can’t place. He salutes her sharply, then gestures to the man in the yellow coat. “This is Douglas Carver, a representative from Vault-Tec.”

The short one, Carver, smiles nervously, and Danny shakes his clammy and cold outstretched hand.

“Is there... something I can do for you?” Danny replies in English.

“If you would be so kind as to allow us inside, we have something urgent we need to discuss with you.”

“... Alright.”

Danny stands aside, and Grimes steps briskly over the threshold and into the living room, followed by Carver. Grimes gives Carver a look, inclining his head towards Danny, and Carver clears his throat and speaks.

"Your Majesty, we're here on behalf of Vault-Tec to tell you and your family that you've been selected, uh,” he says, stuttering his way through something that sounds rehearsed as Grimes becomes increasingly more irritated beside him, “You've been selected for a place in, uh… one of Vault-Tec's top of the line-”

Carver trails off into mumbles, flipping through the papers on his clipboard for several minutes as he composes himself, and Grimes sighs angrily.

“Alright, we don’t have time for this,” Grimes snaps at Carver, then turns to Danny. “I’ll get right to the point, Your Highness. The bombs are coming. Most likely within an hour.”

“... What?”

He looks from Danny to Penn and Ellie, then to Ari and Shaun, and then back to Danny.

“Due to your status as an important political figure, and...” his eyes move briefly to Ellie’s prosthetic leg, and he continues, “Your husband’s military service, we have made space for you, your family, and your sister in the vault just outside this neighborhood. I imagine your family in your homeland already know of the bombs, but if you have any calls to make I suggest you make them now. Time is extremely limited.”

 

Ellie calls his father first, speaking quietly to him in Russian. Danny and Penn sit on either side of him as Codsworth packs their things, lamenting in his tinny voice about ‘the horror of it all’ to Ari as she helps him sort out what’s important and what can be left behind. Occasionally, Ellie looks like he’s about to cry, but he doesn’t.

Penn watches Codsworth and Ari bring their bags to the living room and remarks quietly, distantly, that it’s a good thing they were already on vacation.

Less to pack.

Time seems to pass so fast. Before they know it, the call to Ellie’s father has gone on for twenty minutes, and they have to call Danny and Ari’s family. Grimes and Carver have long since left with their suitcases when Danny dials and sets it on speaker.

It’s before dawn in the homeland, but Grimes was right. Danny and Ari’s parents know. Their father and second mother aren’t home, too busy helping people get to their bunkers to stay and wait for Danny and Ari’s call.

Danny asks several times if everyone has someplace to go. Her first mother assures her, her voice breaking, that everyone will be safe. Malia will be with her girlfriend, Gina, in Gina’s family’s bunker. Brina, Kaiden, and Kaiden’s boyfriend Liam all have spots in the bunker on the northern side of town.

Everyone will be safe.

Penn calls his mother, and their conversation is short. She tells him over and over again how much she loves him, how she will pray that he stays safe. In the end, he can barely speak through his tears.

Grimes and Carver go ahead to the vault, taking the bags with them, and just before Danny, Penn, and Ellie leave to follow them, Danny calls her family again, leaving a message on the answering machine when nobody picks up.

“It’s me again. We’re... about to go to the Vault. I just...” she says, trying desperately to keep together, and she takes a deep breath before she continues. “When… when it's safe to be above ground, we’re coming home. I promise, if it's the last thing I do, I’ll get everyone home.”

 

Danny knows her family is safe in bunkers. She knows her mother-in-law and father-in-law are safe, too. She knows her son, her husbands, and her sister are safe here, in the vault.

And she knows the life she had before is gone.

Outsiders. _Fucking_ outsiders, fighting and killing and dropping atom bombs over drops of oil when they have cars with fusion reactor engines and robots to hang their laundry on the line and keep their homes clean. She wishes she had the energy to be angry.

Danny changes into the blue and yellow suit a doctor hands her in a tiny pop-up tent that she’s a few inches shy of being too tall for. The color of it stands out ugly against her amber brown skin.

Penn and Ellie wait outside for her in their own blue and yellow suits, standing close together with Shaun between them, Penn’s face pressed against Ellie’s shoulder. Ari stands off to the side embracing a woman none of them know, a waifish, weeping thing in another blue and yellow suit who sobs into Ari’s shoulder that her husband was at work, if only he hadn’t gone to work. Ari's English isn't very good, but pain and comfort are universal.

Shaun will grow divorced from the culture he was born to lead. There won’t be a hunt on his walking day, there won’t be gifts from his grandparents and aunts and uncles on his birthdays, there won't be fireworks on his first year at Ka'p Ki'ye'sh. He will hear stories of his extended family and he’ll know all the old myths, but even though Danny has pictures of home in her wallet, they’re poor substitutes for their subjects.

Danny drinks a bottle of water that a woman in a lab coat hands her and wishes she was home.

A doctor comes to them with a clipboard. His questions don’t take long. A few inquiries about Penn’s heart condition, a few about the leg Ellie lost in the war.

He looks Shaun over last, peering into his face with a pen flashlight and earning a screaming fit from Shaun for his efforts that Penn soothes with Danny and Ellie’s help.

Danny kisses Penn before he steps into his pod. She kisses Ellie, too, before he gets into his, and she and Ari embrace for a long moment before they’re both seated in their own.

An automated voice counts down from ten from above, and Danny lifts her hand to wave to Penn in the pod across the aisle. He gives her an anxious smile and waves back.

Before the countdown reaches zero, she’s unconscious.

 

 

The first thing Danny is aware of is the unbearable, penetrating cold.

Her body feels sluggish and heavy. She can hear voices outside her pod, and she draws in on herself against the biting air, drifting back into the dark.

When she wakes again and opens her eyes, there are people outside in the room.

“Ah, here. These two,” a woman in a white hazmat suit says in English.

“Open them,” a man’s voice orders from out of sight.

She leans close to the glass for a better view and sees Ellie’s pod opening next to Penn’s. He stirs, and before he’s aware enough to fight back, a man in a white hazmat suit injects something into his neck. Ellie slumps forward into the waiting arms of three men and is carried out of sight, and fear curls in Danny’s stomach like a mountain rattler.

“...Hey, don't… don't touch my… family.”

Her voice doesn’t come out more than a weak croak, and no one seems to hear her. She pounds on the glass once with her fist, and across the aisle Penn’s pod opens.

“What are you... doing...”

Penn curls forward, trying to keep Shaun warm, and a woman in a hazmat suit comes from out of Danny’s view and holds her arms out to him. Penn tries to get out of the pod, but the woman shakes her head.

“Come on, just let me take him,” the woman says, her voice muffled by both the pod door and her suit, and Penn now knows, too, that something is wrong.

“No... don’t,” he replies, coughing, but the woman reaches closer and as Penn speaks a man in a leather jacket steps from the shadows. “What are you doing, don’t-”

Shaun starts to cry, and the man in the leather jacket withdraws a gun from a holster at his hip and aims it at Penn.

“Let the boy go,” the man says, cocking back the hammer with his thumb. “I’m only gonna tell you once.”

“No, what are you doing?!” Danny protests, thumping on the glass with her fists, “Don’t touch my son, don’t-”

A gunshot sounds, and as Penn crumples backward in his pod, the woman takes Danny’s screaming son from her husband’s lifeless arms and out of sight.

“I’ll.... I’ll kill you!” she screams hoarsely, beating her fists sore against the glass, and the man who killed her husband stares into the window of her pod. “ _I’ll kill you_!”

He says something, looking her over smugly as Penn’s pod closes over his corpse, but Danny’s screaming is too loud for her to hear him.

“I'll rip you limb from limb! You will _beg for death_ by the time I'm done with you!”

He moves out of sight, and before Danny can find a way to fight it she has already drifted back into the dark.

 

An alarm sounds somewhere outside the pod.

Danny wakes again, this time to Ari’s voice.

“Danny? Danny, please, answer me!”

She sounds frightened.

The pod door hisses and slowly rises open, and Danny stumbles forward into Ari’s arms.

“God above, Danny, you wouldn’t wake up, I thought... God, I thought...”

It can’t be real. It was a nightmare, some kind of side effect of the cryogenic process.

“Ellie isn’t in his-... it’s empty, Danny, what happened?”

Danny pushes Ari away, staggering to Penn’s pod and struggling with the door’s controls.

“Come on, come on, _open_.”

Ari hurries to the controls next to her, flicking a few switches and flipping the large, red lever that opens the door.

“They... they took Shaun. They took Ellie.”

The door rises so slowly.

Danny can't breathe.

Penn’s body is still there, and he’s still dead.

A single round bullet hole marrs his smooth, brown temple, a mist of blood painting the wall of the pod behind him, and Danny takes his cold hands in her own.

From speakers above her, an automated recording plays on repeat.

“Failure in cryogenic array. Vault residents must vacate immediately.”

Danny squeezes Penn’s hands, and his fingers don’t bend. She swallows the lump in her throat.

She’s already broken her promise.

“I’ll find whoever took them. I’ll get them back, and I’ll make the people who did this pay,” she whispers, cupping Penn’s face in her hands and stroking his frozen skin. “I promise you.”                                                         

 

“When... when we can, we should come back for the people here. Bury them, or burn them,” Ari says. “... They deserve to rest.”

Danny nods but remains silent.

“God above. 210 years... what do we do now?”

Danny doesn’t have an answer for Ari’s question, taking another drag from her cigarette as they sit on the top of the cliff by the vault elevator. The last plumes of smoke from Penn’s funeral pyre waft past them and towards the pink and gold fan of sunrise, garbage bags and backpacks stuffed with supplies from the vault below stacked nearby.

“... Danny?”

When Danny turns and looks at her sister, Ari’s expression is bleak.

“Are we going to be okay?”

Danny looks back out at the land ahead. Even though the world is many shades less green and the trees with leaves are far outnumbered by those without, the sky still promises to be blue. Home is two hundred years and three thousand miles away, so far beyond Danny’s reach that she cannot bear to think about it.

Now Danny sits next to her sister on a cliff facing the irradiated ruins of Boston, with no idea where to go or how to start, with more work ahead than she can comprehend.

“I don’t know,” she finally replies, and she takes Ari’s hand in her own. “But I will keep you safe. I promise.”

Uncertainty is a foul tar in the pit of her stomach. She doesn’t know where to go from here, but there is one thing she’s sure about.

She will have revenge, no matter what it takes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ki've - cabbage. used as an insult by children  
> Ka'p Ki'ye'sh - Festival of Constellations


	2. Chapter 2

 

Sanctuary is a shadow of what it was before.

Grass grows through the cracks in the concrete. Gnarled, sickly trees grow up through the roofs of half-standing homes. The debris of people’s lives lay scattered over the neighborhood, husks of suitcases with rotted scraps of cloth inside, tipped-over bikes and tricycles, the rusted shells of cars parked under sagging carports and sitting dead in the road.

The first day had been the worst. Nearly everywhere they had looked, lying sun-bleached on the road or partially covered by overgrown brush, there were skeletons. Some had been nearly eaten away by the elements, but many remained whole, staring at the sky with empty sockets. Adults. Children.

Babies.

‘Grotesque’ was the only word that had really covered it.

“Alright, I got the cur-” Ari starts in A’yute’, sputtering into a coughing fit from all the dust and dropping the bundle of cloth to the floor, “Ugh. I got the curtains from every house I could. They’re not in... _great_ shape, but they’ll work.”

“Thank you,” Danny replies.

“Are the repairs going well?”

Danny grumbles in reply, taking one last rusty nail from the box and driving it into the frame of the window before stepping back to examine her work. Two salvaged bits of metal siding now cover the entirety of the window except for a narrow opening between them, large enough to see out of but small enough that it wouldn’t be noticed from a distance.

“Well... I’ll go back to sorting food, then,” Ari says finally, and Danny goes back to her thoughts.

The woman in the hazmat suit.

‘Here. These two’.

Ellie falling forward from his pod.

The man’s finger on the trigger of his gun.

Penn holding Shaun.

The gunshot, and the empty body it left behind.

Logically, she knows she should feel _something_. Angry. Sad. Frightened. Confused.

Anything would be better than this emptiness and the gnawing, consuming hunger for revenge.

Instead, she watches herself gather her tools and metal sheeting and move to the next window, standing somewhere far away, feeling nothing but this desperate need clawing at her insides, and she’s never wanted anything so bad in her whole life.

Between the nightmares of her family being dragged away by crowds of faceless enemies, or pulled from her arms by wind made of hands, she dreams of the faces of the people who stole them from her. In the good dreams, she finds the man with the scars, catches him unaware, and kills him.

Sometimes it’s with her hands.

Sometimes with weapons.

Sometimes she just screams at him as loud as she can, and his body boils away until he’s nothing but another skeleton lying bleached and lifeless on the ground.

Danny never knew she had such violence in her, but she’s ready to embrace it if it gets her family back. She will have vengeance, no matter what it takes, in whatever way presents itself.

“Danny?” Ari says, interrupting Danny’s thoughts.

“... What?”

“What’s... Cram?” Ari asks when Danny turns to her. She turns the tin over in her hands, looking at the nutritional information on the back label. “It looks like some weird kind of meat...”

“It’s... it’s like cheap dog food. Not worth saving,” Danny replies, and Ari shrugs and tosses it into the trash pile. “You need to practice your English more. You’ll need it here.”

Ari grimaces but doesn’t argue the point.

Codsworth’s engine sputters into earshot, and he appears in the doorway of the house Danny and Ari have slept in for the few days that have passed since they woke up.

“Apologies for the delay, Miss Danny. Here are the pieces of metal siding you requested.”

“Thank you, Codsworth.”

He leans the sheeting against the wall near her and waits, one eye pod turning to glance at Ari while the other two focus on Danny.

“Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

“No. Thank you.”

“Coddy, you want help me?” Ari asks in English, her accent even thicker than Danny’s, and she picks up two cans of baked beans and holds them out towards him. “You... scan? Tell what is good?”

“Most certainly, Miss Ari,” Codsworth replies.

He takes the cans from her, each in a different clawed hand, and looks at them closely.

“This one is still edible,” he says after a long moment, handing the can back to Ari, “But I’m afraid this one has long since expired.”

It takes a moment for Ari to absorb this, but then she nods.

“E'nka'. Those?” she asks, gesturing at the table of canned goods.

Codsworth and Ari go through the rest of the canned goods this way. It takes a while, and as they sort the expired foods from the ones that are still good, Danny continues to repair.

This house will need to be safe for when she gets Shaun back. She figures they’ll have to stay here in Boston for a least a year, maybe even longer, so he’s old enough to understand on the trip back home that sometimes he must be quiet because it’s dangerous to make noise. An infant would be a liability, and it is imperative that the trip west go as smoothly as possible.

Part of her, an awful, shameful part, is almost glad that they took him. Not because she wants to be apart from her son, her _heir_ , the child she waited years for, but because wherever he is he must be needed for something, and if they need him they are keeping him safe.

Maybe... maybe someone there even loves him. Maybe some rich person sent mercenaries to find a healthy baby because their own children never lived, and maybe they love him as their own.

It’s an improbable hope, but she keeps it just the same.

It’s clear to her that the people who took her family are not amateurs. They knew who they came to take, they knew how to operate the pods. Vaults are meant to keep everything out, and they're hard to open. These weren’t bandits who stumbled across the vault, but mercenaries sent to retrieve her family for unknown purpose by unknown people. People with power.

It occurs to her, very suddenly, that they can’t use their real names here. These people most certainly have informants. All it would take is one person hearing her name, taking it back to the source, and she and Ari would be found.

Danny doesn’t know what the people who took her family would do when they found them, but she doesn’t want to find out.

“Ari, come here,” she calls out in A’yute’.

Ari wanders into the room after a few moments, examining the can of peaches she holds in her hand.

“What is it?”

“We need fake names.”

Ari processes this for a moment.

“I want to be called... _The Destroyer_.”

“ _No_ ,” Danny responds flatly, and Ari groans. “A surname, Ari. Something... American.”

Ari stares at the can of peaches for a few moments, eyebrows pinched together in thought before finally speaking.

“... North,” she says in English.

Danny gives her a long, questioning glance, and Ari shrugs.

“North it is,” Danny says in kind, “Ari and Danny North.”

 

Letting Ari come to Concord seems like something Danny is going to regret, but Ari was insistent, and Danny got tired of arguing about it after the second hour.

“Are you feeling okay?” Danny asks her sister in A’yute’, looking Ari over with her hands on Ari’s shoulders. “Do you feel sick?”

“I’m _fine_ , Danny,” Ari says curtly, breaking away from Danny’s grasp and turning her backpack to Danny. “Stop trying to make me stay behind.”

Danny digs through Ari’s suitcase on the dresser, taking two pairs of socks and shoving them into Ari’s pack beside cans of food and other spare clothes. Danny already has the the blood pack, so she tucks their four stimpaks into Ari’s pack.

“Are you sure we should be wearing these weird suits?” Ari asks, tugging at the sleeve of her vault suit as Danny finishes packing her bag. “They don’t seem good for hiding.”

“They aren’t, but they offer some protection from radiation, and we have nothing else,” she replies, and zips up Ari’s backpack. “Alright. You’re all packed. Time for weapons.”

Ari turns around as Danny opens the topmost drawer of the dresser and withdraws a pistol and a shotgun, setting the shotgun aside and handing the pistol to Ari.

“Don’t use this unless you have to. Use your bat, or the knife.”

“... Why?” Ari asks, giving Danny a suspicious glance.

“Because I don’t think it will be very easy to find a lot of bullets,” Danny responds.

“Oh,” Ari says simply, and looks the pistol over for a moment before tucking it into the pocket of her coat.

Danny slips her arms into her own newfound jacket, a miraculously large black leather biker thing scavenged from from one of the neighborhood house, and stuffs shotgun shells into the pockets.

“Dede, how have you gone this long without buying a leather jacket?” Ari says, grinning, as Danny tugs her braid out from under the collar of her jacket and winds it up into a bun on the back of her head. “This is a really good look for you.”

“Maybe, but ‘irritable dive bar bouncer’ isn’t a good look for _High Chief_ ,” Danny replies, tucking bobby pins into the knot of hair until it stays up by itself when she shakes her head.

“Pah,” Ari says dismissively before looking over at Danny, “... What’s a... ‘dive bar’?”

A thoughtful expression crosses Ari’s face, almost as if she’s imagining what something called a ‘dive bar’ might be.

“It’s an American expression. It’s what you call a bar, but... a bar in poor condition, with unpleasant customers and bad drinks,” Danny says, and Ari looks disappointed but lets the subject die. “Rest the bat on the straps of your pack and tighten them. Not so much that you can’t take it out, but enough that it stays.”

Ari does as Danny says, wriggling her shoulders to make the straps settle comfortably, and watches Danny check and recheck that she has everything she needs in easily-accessible places.

Gunshots can be heard far off in the distance, over the mountain behind the neighborhood, and for a moment they both pause with their heads turned towards the noise.

“So... what’s the plan?” Ari asks, knowing Danny well enough to know she already has one.

“We question everyone,” Danny says, “You stay where I can see you, always. If someone threatens you, kill them.”

“... Okay,” Ari responds.

“If I tell you to do something, you do it, without argument or hesitation,” Danny continues, and Ari opens her mouth but Danny speaks again before she can protest, “ _Don’t_ argue with me, Areanuka. I am the eldest. If I tell you to run away, you run away. If I tell you to hide, you hide. You understand?”

Ari nods begrudgingly, scowling at the use of her full name.

“... Yeah.”

“Good. Are you ready?”

Ari withdraws her new pistol from it's holster, popping the clip out and checking it and then snapping it back in place before tucking it into her coat pocket.

“Yeah. I'm ready.”

Codsworth wishes them luck as they leave the patched house and start down the road, and with the sun beginning its slow descent towards the horizon they head southeast to Concord.

 

Except for a few very large bugs that are easily dispatched with baseball bats, the walk to Concord is mostly uneventful. Ari discovers that she can play radio stations on her PipBoy and cranks up something called ‘Diamond City Radio’, humming along with Frank Sinatra and Dion.

After ‘Runaround Sue’ trails off into silence, a man speaks.

“That, uh.... that was ‘Runaround Sue’... from Dion,” he says over the waves, sounding almost like he might be about to panic, “Up next is... uh. Magnolia?”

“... I think this DJ needs to reconsider his line of work,” Ari says, giving Danny a sidelong glance, and they move around a bus crashed lengthwise across the road to find themselves in front of the main street of Concord.

Just as Codsworth said, there’s someone here. Two dozen meters ahead, a man stands by a fire in the center of the road, his back towards them.

Danny taps Ari’s arm to get her attention and puts her finger to her lips. Ari nods, and they start quietly towards the man.

As they approach him, the details of his appearance become more clear. He’s short and white, with his hair shaved into an asymmetrical mohawk that bothers Danny deeply, and he’s wearing darkly-stained jeans and a tattered tweed jacket.

When they’re several meters away, Danny stops.

“Hey, you,” she says in English.

The man startles, dropping a cigarette, and whirls around.

“Have you seen a man with a-” Danny begins, but the man interrupts her.

“Hold it, vaultie,” he snarls in English, brandishing a knife, and now that he’s facing her Danny can see something red smeared across his face. “Fuckin’ sneakin’ up on me.”

The wind at his back carries the smell of blood.

Danny tightens her grip on her bat.

“This is Gristle’s territory now,” he says, closing the distance between them until they’re only three meters apart. “You wanna pass through, you gotta pay the tax. 50 caps each.”

Danny glances around, and the street is empty. The man seems to be alone, guarding the road into Concord all by himself.

“... Tax? Don’t you mean toll?” Danny replies, and the man’s expression goes from an irritated frown to a hateful scowl as she speaks.

“No, I mean _tax_ , you ugly bitch, and now it’s 200 or I end the both of you,” he spits, and Danny bristles at the insult.

“... Fuck you.”

The man predictably charges her with his knife low, arm ready to swing up and bury the blade in her stomach. In one fluid motion, Danny cocks back her bat, steps forward, and swings for the man’s head as his knife rushes up towards her stomach.

The wood connects with his skull with a loud crunch and he lurches sideways onto the asphalt, his knife skittering away across the road.

A moment passes, and a crow calls from a power line overhead.

Danny stands above the man’s body, uninjured but a little winded from the effort, and Ari lets out an unsteady held breath.

“Holy shit,” Ari finally says in A’yute’, leaning to peek past Danny to see the man’s body. “... Is he dead?”

The side of the man’s skull is caved in from the force of Danny’s swing, a short trail of blood trickling from the broken shell of his ear, and his open eyes seem to bulge out more than they’re supposed to.

“Yeah.”

“... Are you okay? He didn’t get you, did he?”

Danny is quiet for a moment before she answers, still staring at the man’s disfigured head.

“No. I’m fine.”

Danny searches the man’s pockets without expression, finding a handful of 10mm bullets, six shotgun shells, and two syringes: one is Med-X, and the other has ‘PSYCHO’ scribbled on the side. She also finds a small leather sack that jingles when she shakes it. Upon further inspection, seventeen bottle caps are found inside, and Danny looks at them in confusion.

“... Why would someone keep bottle caps?”

“Only God and the Mother know. Radiation-crazy, maybe,” Ari says and shrugs, taking the 10mms from Danny’s hand and loading them into the clip of her pistol before gesturing for the syringes. “Give, I’ll put them away.”

Danny hands them over and examines the leather sack again.

That man said ‘50 caps each’. ‘200 caps’.

Bottle caps?

“I think... I think they might be money.”

“... Bottle caps as money? Why?”

Danny dumps the sack’s contents out into her hand, examining the caps more closely. There’s 17 of them total.

“‘Why even bother with money’ is a better question,” Danny says, frowning down at the caps in her hand. “‘Gristle’s territory now’ implies that Boston lacks any governing body. How do they regulate its worth?”

Despite her opinions, she tips the caps back into the sack and pockets it.

Before they move on, Danny gives the corpse on the ground one more glance, her eyes lingering on the concave indentation in his skull.

“... Let’s go,” she mutters, and they continue down the street.

They don’t make it more than a couple meters when a woman comes around the corner ahead of them at a jog, stopping dead in her tracks when she sees them. She says something inaudible and from this distance they can’t see her expression, but when she withdraws a gun Danny doesn’t have any questions about what the woman wants.

“Run, Ari,” Danny says, and they run.

The woman makes chase, a dozen meters behind them as Danny and Ari reach and enter a nearby alley with bullets blowing pockmarks into the brick wall beside them. Danny shoves Ari ahead when they reach the road at its end, pointing.

“Hey, don’t-”

“Just go! Hide, I’ll find you!” Danny blurts. Ari looks like she might be about to protest, her eyes wide and her lips parted, but she goes anyways.

Danny pulls out her knife, drops her pack, and presses herself flat against the wall next to the corner, watching as Ari runs down the alley and disappears into a building.

Catch her as she rounds the corner and stab her. No sense in wasting a shell and drawing more attention.

As the woman leaves the mouth of the alley, Danny pushes away from the wall, gravel crunching as her boots dig in, hand out to grab the woman by the hair and drag her down.

“Where-” is as far as the woman gets before Danny takes hold of her hair and yanks her head back, plunging her knife into the woman’s neck. Blood bubbles forth from the wound and the heat of it washes down over Danny’s hand.

The woman briefly tries to fight back, quiet gurgling sounds issuing forth from the hole in her neck as her throat fills with blood and her fingers claw at Danny’s blood-slick hand, but she quickly goes still. Danny picks her up as she crumples towards the ground and carries her back into the alley to a dumpster, lifting the lid and dropping her inside before shutting it again and turning to leave.

And then she stops.

For a moment, she stands there and stares at the dumpster, a thought beginning to form itself.

She’s killed two people today.

She has taken two living, breathing lives, and snuffed them out.

She lets the thought marinate in her head for a moment. Danny has killed many animals. She’s been hunting since she was 15. Deer, mountain goats, pronghorns. She killed a bear, the first and only, when she was 18, and two cougars when she was 21 and 25.

She’s never killed a person before today. Again, distantly, she knows she should feel something, but no feeling comes.

Danny lifts the lid of the dumpster with a single, bloody hand, looking over the woman’s body. She’s young, maybe 20, and her open, glassy eyes are brown. A strand of blonde hair escapes from under her hat. Danny digs into the pockets of the woman’s pants and coat, pulling out three fusion cells and something wrapped in a bandana.

When she opens up the bandana, she finds a photograph. The woman who now lies dead in the dumpster stands in front of a brick wall next to a young man, his arm around her shoulder. They’re both smiling, and she’s holding a bouquet of flowers, the man wearing a crown woven of the same variety.

No matter what it takes.

Whatever way presents itself.

Danny drops the photo into the dumpster, takes the bandana, wipes her hands, and closes the lid of the dumpster before discarding the soiled cloth on the ground and leaving the alley to find Ari.

The only door that isn’t boarded over or full of debris, and the only door Ari could have entered, leads into what looks like it was once a clothing shop. Molded plastic hangers and rags that were likely once clothes litter the floor, several empty circular and H-shaped racks standing around the room.

Danny calls Ari’s name quietly, and a head of green hair rises from behind what was once a shopkeeper’s counter.

“I didn’t hear any gunshots,” Ari says, climbing over a pile of refuse where a stack of shopping baskets has fallen and accumulated paper and plastic parasites over the centuries and then dusting herself off.

“I told you, we can’t waste ammunition,” Danny replies and heads to the door. “Come on, we need to get away from here. This neighborhood isn’t safe.”

The alley is empty when they emerge into it. Danny can hear voices shouting in the direction of the street they came from, but they don’t sound like they’re on their way closer, so she and Ari proceed down the alley in the opposite direction.

A loud, unfamiliar noise cuts through the silence ahead, followed by a spatter of gunshots, then two more unfamiliar noises. It’s almost like a plucked fiddle string, but out of tune and much too deep.

“... This way,” Danny says quietly, and Ari follows.

When they reach the end of the street, Danny holds a hand up over her shoulder and Ari stops just before the corner of the building, waiting. Across the street, up on a balcony, stands a man. He’s Black, wearing a long beige duster and a wide-brimmed hat, and when he catches sight of Danny he calls out to her in English.

“Hey, you! We’re trapped, and the raiders inside are almost through the door! Grab that laser musket and help us, please!”

He lifts his gun and fires, that unfamiliar sound splitting the air as a red bolt of energy whizzes off down another street, and then he disappears inside through a set of double doors.

“Danny, what’s going on? What’s that noise?”

“Some kind of gun. American military, maybe,” Danny says as she dips back into the alley. “He and some people are trapped in that building.”

“I heard. Should we help them?”

Danny gives this a moment of thought. Whether or not it’s a trap, there’s probably supplies to be gained. Ammunition, too, and she and Ari only have a few dozen bullets and shells between them.

“... We’ll go, but you stay _behind me_ , and you go where and when I tell you to go. Understand?”

Ari frowns petulantly but agrees, and they hug the side of the building around to the main intersection of Concord, watching for movement as they go.

When Danny is sure the coast is clear, they jog across the street and towards the front doors of the building where the corpse of a man lies, and Danny picks up his discarded laser musket and its ammunition, a dozen or so fusion cells.

“How do you _work_ that thing?” Ari asks, peering at the weapon as Danny turns it over in her hands.

Danny moves and turns to face out into the street, her back almost touching the bricks of the wall behind her, and tugs Ari away from the double doors by her elbow.

“Stay close to the wall, dummy. You make a good target, standing out in the open like that.”

On the underside of the... laser musket, as the man had called it, up towards the odd glass tube of a barrel, is a small chamber about the same size as a fusion cell. With a tilt of her head and a frown, Danny tries to clip the fusion cell in with the positive end facing the barrel, frowning deeper when it doesn’t work, and then flips it around the other way.

The fusion cell snaps into the chamber with a click, and Danny rotates the handle a few times, flashing lights and popping sounds coming to life inside the glass tube.

“... Huh.”

She pockets the fusion cells, the metal casings making quiet clicking sounds against the shotgun shells, and she and Ari slip inside through the double doors.

 

The main hall of the museum is almost silent except for rhythmic, hollow thumps. With a tilt of her head, Danny can tell they’re above her somewhere in the open atrium, probably on one of the balconies to the left.

To Danny and Ari’s right is a door with a sign above it proclaiming it ‘TOUR ENTRANCE’. In the center of the wall ahead of them, a wrought-iron gate separates the entrance hall from what looks to be a set of stairs.

High up ahead, near the start of a broken walkway on the third floor, a person with a shaved head sits on a box smoking a cigarette, their back towards the door. Their rifle stands nearby, leaning up against a railing. Another two people sit on wooden crates on the second floor balcony.

Danny motions for Ari to go to the doorway to the right, following her into the alcove. Somewhere nearby on the first floor, Danny can hear several speaking together but their voices are too low or too far away for the words to be made out.

At least... seven people. Probably more that she can’t hear or see.

Danny stares out into the hallway ahead, thinking, as Ari shuffles through her pockets.

Sneaking through and picking them off one by one would be the safest and most sensible course of action.

“Hey, Danny?” Ari murmurs, a question in her voice.

“Give me a moment, Ari, I’m trying to think.”

They’ve already made it across the main hall without being seen, and it’s not likely they’ll be so lucky again.

“... We go this way. Stay behind me.”

Speakers play recordings overhead as they make their way down the hallway and into a dim room full of still figures. As they move closer, they can tell that they’re mannequins dressed cheaply as American revolutionary soldiers.

“Yeesh. Spooky,” Ari murmurs as they weave through the silent, plastic bodies, and Danny scowls.

“They could have been paying actors to do this,” she says, sneering. “ _Americans_. Always trying to fill their pockets at the expense of quality.”

“It would have been less _creepy_ with real people, too.”

Someone drops something in the next room, startling them both, and Danny bumps one of the mannequins. It teeters and then falls, knocking two more and sending them both tumbling to the ground as Danny swears under her breath.

“Who’s out there?” a masculine voice calls in English from somewhere ahead, and before Danny and Ari can hide there’s a man in the doorway across the next room, a rifle propped against his shoulder.

Danny grabs Ari by the arm and drags her out of the doorway, narrowly avoiding the bullets that bury themselves in the mannequins and knock them into a pile of limbs and torsos.

With one arm, Danny presses Ari to the wall, keeping herself between the doorway and her sister. Footsteps approach through the next room as Ari fumbles with her pistol, and Danny raises her shotgun to kill the incoming threat.

And then she has an idea.

“You. Man with rifle,” she says in English, and the footsteps scuffle like the man wasn’t expecting to hear her speak. “Do you want to die?”

“... What?” he croaks.

“ _Do you want to die_?” she enunciates crisply. “There are two of us. There is one of you.”

The man goes quiet, so Danny continues.

“Kick your weapons out into this room, and I’ll let you leave.”

The man is still silent for several long, tense moments, and suddenly his rifle comes skidding out into the room of mannequins, followed by some shuffling fabric noises, and a pistol follows the rifle across the floor.

“... There,” he says.

“Good. Step through the door, so I can see you aren’t armed. I will not shoot you.”

After another tense moment, his shadow darkens the door and he steps through, arms raised. He has a stripe of black greasepaint across his pale forehead, and equally black and greasy hair pulled back into a low ponytail.

True to her word, Danny doesn’t shoot him, but she keeps her shotgun ready.

“So.... I can go?” he asks, the expression on his face somewhere between frightened and perplexed.

Danny stands, gesturing towards the hall they came in through with her shotgun, and the man runs, his footsteps receding until Danny can hear the front doors of the museum clatter shut.

“... That went well,” Ari remarks in A’yute’.

“Suspiciously so,” Danny says in reply, staring out towards the hallway. After a moment she picks up the man’s guns, handing off the rifle to Ari and discarding the pistol after pocketing its half-full 10mm clip.

They move through the next room without incident, speakers overhead playing a very poor representation of an Irish accent. Wooden crates and barrels are stacked on a set made out to look like the deck of a ship, and mannequins in American colonial costume stand stiffly around the room, one holding a foam block painted badly to look like a wooden crate out in front of itself.

They enter the next room, and off to the left past several glass display cases is an open doorway with stairs beyond.

“I wonder what they used to have in all of these cases,” Ari murmurs, lifting the lid of an intact display to peer at the rotten cloth inside. She leans down to look closer and suddenly gags, quickly closing the lid again and coughing. “God above, that’s a smell I won’t forget any time soon.”

She opens another case, withdrawing a plain brass teapot and looking it over.

“You know, this is actually in pretty good shape. I’m gonna keep it.”

“Stop fiddling with things,” Danny says irritatedly, and Ari puts the teapot into her pack.

“Hey!” shouts a voice from the door in English, and Danny whirls with her shotgun raised to find a man there with a machete in his hands. “Who the fuck are you?”

Danny pulls the trigger of her shotgun and packs his face full of buckshot. Her ears ring as the man crumples to the floor, and as she moves to reload her shotgun another gunshot splits the air and startles her so badly that she drops the shells.

Across the room, Ari cries out and collapses to the floor.

“... Ari?” Danny stammers, but Ari doesn’t answer. Panic floods cold in the pit of her stomach. “Who-”

“I bet you thought Frankie here was alone, huh?” interrupts another English-speaking voice from the door.

A woman steps through the doorway, pushing the bolt of her rifle forward to reload the chamber as she nudges the dead man on the floor with the toe of her boot.

She shot Ari.

She SHOT Ari.

Suddenly Danny’s back in the vault, uselessly pounding on the door of her pod, watching the man with the scars shoot her husband.

“Not real smart, stoppin’ to-”

Danny lets out a scream and throws herself at the woman.

“Motherfu-” the woman starts, falling to the floor with Danny following on top of her. “Get offa me you-”

Danny interrupts her by bringing the stock of her shotgun down on the woman’s face. At the first hit, her nose flattens and begins to gush blood. The second opens the skin of her forehead. The third breaks her jaw.

Danny stops counting.

 

Hitting the floor knocks the wind out of Ari’s lungs and she gasps and coughs, trying to suck in air. Her hands instinctively search for the source of the searing pain she feels, finding a growing patch of wet heat in the outer meat of her thigh and pressing her hands hard over it.

She tries to call for Danny but she’s too out of breath, her sister’s name only coming out as a wheeze. Her ears ring from the shot fired in the small room.

Don’t panic, she tells herself, but the racing of her heart and the dry tightness of her throat tell a different story. There's so much blood.

As her breath comes back to her, the whine in her ears subsides to leave behind rhythmic, wet impacts from somewhere nearby.

“Danny?” Ari calls weakly, and the noises cease. “Danny, I-”

Danny appears around the end of the display cases, her thighs and stomach soaked in blood, her hands painted up to the elbows with it. She pants heavily, her face twisted into a terrifying scowl, and Ari swallows the lump she suddenly finds in her throat.

“How bad is it?” Danny asks, and Ari can hear the wavering in her voice as Danny crouches down beside her and rifles through Ari’s pack.

“I... I don’t...” Ari trails off, still staring at all the blood.

How could so much blood come out of a person? Ari’s been in plenty of fights. Couple of bar scuffles, a whole lot of schoolyard knockdowns with bullies, one incredibly misguided attempt at the summer martial tourney two years ago, but she’s never seen this much at once.

“...Ari. Do you have any other stimpaks?”

“No, why? We’ve got four of them in my...” she trails off, comprehension dawning, “... What happened to them?”

“They were crushed when you fell,” Danny replies, and Ari’s stomach drops down to her feet. After digging through Ari’s bag for a few more moment, Danny tugs out a shirt and rips the sleeve off.

“Wha-... What about my leg?”

“Move your hands.”

Ari does, and Danny ties the arm of the shirt tightly around her thigh.

“I’m hoping the people upstairs will have a stimpak,” Danny says, tucking one arm under Ari’s knees and the other behind her back before lifting her. Ari gasps, the new position of her legs sending spasms of pain through her thigh, and now that she lies against Danny’s chest she can feel Danny’s quick, panicked breaths against her body.

Danny carries her out into the atrium, a T-shaped set of stairs leading up to the right, a gated arch to the left, and on the other side of the room a collapsed section of floor has left a ramp open to the basement.

After a moment, Danny carries her down the ramp and into the darkened basement. Ari can’t see much from Danny’s arms, but she can see the metal grating of a caged room and the fusion generator stored inside before they move past a set of stairs going up in back corner of the room. As Danny sets her down on the ground, Ari finds herself in a section of the basement where the fallen floor above has formed a small, dark alcove that’s hidden away from view.

“Stay here. Once I reach the people upstairs, I’ll bring help,” Danny says, and without another word she disappears back out the way the came, her footsteps fading as she ascends the stairs above.

Gunshots sound overhead. Ari waits. More gunshots, and then screams. The strange gun fires its metallic, twanging ammunition, and then silence for longer than Ari is comfortable with.

Danny... Danny must be in trouble.

Using the wall as leverage, Ari staggers to her feet and limps awkwardly out into the basement.

Suddenly a body smashes onto the collapsed ramp of floor from above, and Ari suppresses a startled scream.

God above.

When she looks closer, she finds that the corpse’s head has been smashed in, likely with a bat.

Well. That answers that worry.

Now that she’s on her feet, she can see the room around her more clearly. It’s much smaller than she thought it would be, most of its space eaten up by crumbled walls and invading silt. The only things of any particular interest are a maintenance area with a counter and some scattered tools at the base of the stairs and the caged fusion generator.

The fusion generator is interesting. Still working after two whole centuries. Keeping this whole place well-lit and easy to fight in.

There’s an idea.

She hobbles over to the gate, finding it locked and swearing under her breath. The terminal beside it is also locked, but with a password, and she swears again.

What kind of password would an American janitor use?

She tries ‘broom’ first, with no success. Admittedly, she thinks to herself, this was a poor idea.

After a moment of thought, she tries ‘password’.

The lock unlatches, and Ari presses her lips into a thin line.

Incredible.

She limps in through the gate, giving the generator a look over. Looks like an Atomica 1300-B. Not that she knows everything there is to know about Atomica’s industrial models, but it can’t be too different from the domestic Atomica 700-A her parents had back home for when typhoons and earthquakes hit.

“So... undo the safety... unhook the latch... and,” she murmurs, bracing herself. With a single strong tug, she pulls hard on the fusion core and uncouples it from the generator. The generator whines, groans, and then dies, the lights overhead and all around the building flickering and then dying. “There.”

There’s a few angry shouts from overhead, then a series of gunshots from both a shotgun and that weird laser gun that the guy on the balcony had.

Ari’s head swims, and she sinks down onto a toolbox by the generator to keep herself from falling while she waits for Danny to come back.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> E'nka' - thanks
> 
> \----------
> 
> i'm gonna nutshell my last several months for yall to save both you and me some time:  
> family death  
> applying for college  
> another family death, this time a Suicide  
> Chronic Illness (TM)  
> writers block  
> doctor voice: you may have a serious heart condition  
> more writers block
> 
> it's all been Very Bad, which seems like the direction my life is going from now on??? tune in next time to see what dumb shit will happen to wreck my life. maybe i'll get hit by a double-decker bus full of star trek memorabilia and they'll have to perform emergency surgery to remove a spock bobblehead from my left kidney!! who knows?? literally anything could happen!!!
> 
> anyways
> 
> thanks for being patient  
> next chapter coming soon. i already have it written i just have to like.... proofread and shit  
> come swing by my tumblr if you want to yell at me about how long this is taking or just?? say hi???? idk!!! (i'm just kidding please don't yell at me) (you can come say hi tho that would be v nice)  
> wasteland-dan.tumblr.com


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> translations for mobile users can be found at the end of the chapter  
> spoiler: there's a whole fuckin lot of em

The man from the balcony opens the door just as Danny reaches it, giving her a relieved smile and starting to speak.

“Boy, am I glad to-”

“Stimpaks, now!” Danny interrupts, her white-knuckled hand gripping the door frame, and he stutters.

“Wha-”

“My sister has been shot, give me stimpaks! _Now_!”

Another man appears behind the first, a single stimpak in his outstretched hand.

“This is all we have,” he says quickly, “Go.”

Danny snatches it from him and runs. Down the stairs, through the mural room, through the offices, down the large staircase. When she finally skids down the ramp and rushes back to the corner where she left Ari, Ari isn’t there.

Panic sets in, and she flicks on the light switch of her PipBoy.

“... Ari! Ari, where are you?” she calls out in A’yute’, sweeping the light back and forth, and Ari answers from close behind her.

“Here, Danny,” she says, and Danny whirls around to find Ari limping towards her from the darkness.

“What are you doing on your feet? I told you to rest!” Danny rushes to her, bending down to put her arms behind Ari’s knees and back and sweeping her up off the ground.

“First Mother, Dede, I’m fine,” Ari gasps, but she’s not fine. In the light from her PipBoy Danny can see Ari’s brown skin has lost much of its warmth and become worryingly grayed, and beads of sweat have accumulated on her face and neck.

Danny carries her over to a nearby janitor’s workbench, laying Ari across the top of it as Ari groans and grimaces.

“Hold still.”

Ari does as she asks, hissing when Danny tears open the leg of her garish blue suit. Quickly, Danny shuffles out of her pack and pulls a can of water from within, pouring it slowly over the hole in Ari’s thigh.

“ _GOD_ above, First _Mother_ in a wet fucking _shirt_ ,” Ari swears, clenching her jaw as Danny finishes rinsing away the clumps of drying blood.

“Oh, come on, it’s not that bad,” Danny mutters, and Ari scowls up at her.

“Why don’t _you_ get shot then, fucker?”

Danny uncaps the needle of the stimpak and Ari groans and closes her eyes.

“Why do they have to be needles? Why didn’t they make it a spray?”

“On the count of four, then?” Danny says, readying the stimpak, and Ari nods. “Okay. One, two, three-”

At three, she plunges the needle into Ari’s wound and presses down the plunger.

Ari grimaces, hands clenched into fists in the fabric of her coat, and Danny lets out a shuddering, relieved breath as the flesh begins to knit together.

She’ll still need more care, but for now this is enough.

“Thanks be to God above,” she murmurs, giving a raised palm, and Ari lets out her own held breath as Danny lifts her again to carry her upstairs.

“... Are they trustworthy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well... they did give you a stimpak,” Ari says, and Danny shrugs.

Danny readjusts Ari briefly after reaching the top of the stairs, and as they enter the offices the man who gave Danny the stimpak appears ahead.

She didn’t get a good look at him before, outside of seeing that he’s white, but now that she’s paying attention her eyes move over his pomade-fixed pompadour, his scuffed overalls, and his well-stocked tool belt before moving back to his face. He’s shorter than she is, though that’s not saying much since most people are, and his pale skin has a ruddied roughness to it as though he’s recovering from a sunburn.

“You get your sister fixed up alright?” he asks in English, and Danny replies in kind when they approach him.

“Well enough.”

“Good. Preston, that fella that was stutterin’ at you before you demanded stimpaks, he sent me to make sure you two were alright.”

“We’re fine,” Danny says quickly, and Ari frowns up at her. “Me’ uma’ya’ no onso to. La’m no se’he.”

“... A’ya’n,” Ari replies sourly, but doesn’t protest.

The man gives each of them a questioning glance before holding his arms out.

“Here. Lemme carry her. You’ve done enough.”

“ _No_ ,” Danny replies stiffly, scowling and clutching Ari closer, and the man falters.

“Dede,” Ari says gently, and Danny scowls deeper, “Ke a’n opogra’ no me’, ka’ tu muza’r-fu oka’ra’ a’n.”

Danny pauses and then nods before approaching the man, gesturing with Ari until he takes her.

“... Alright then. Let’s get you two upstairs.”

Danny follows him, retrieving her bat as they pass through the hall where she left it and keeping it handy in case the man tries something shady.

‘Preston’ is still standing in the doorway when they reach it, smiling with relief when they approach.

“I... I don’t think you heard me earlier, with you needing that stimpak, but I’m really grateful you helped us. We weren’t gonna last much longer.”

“Watch your head, kiddo,” says the man carrying Ari, and she lifts her head to make it easier for him to fit her through the doorway, “Mama, you mind movin’? We need the couch.”

A muted voice speaks from within the room, and Ari disappears into it in the man’s arms. A lurch of panic roils in Danny’s gut when she can’t see Ari anymore, but after a few steps forward she can see Ari being laid on a couch within.

“Preston Garvey, Commonwealth Minutemen,” the man at the door says, holding out his hand to Danny.

“Danny North, but call me North. My sister is Ari.”

“North and Ari,” the man repeats to himself, smiling. “I just... Thank you. Without your help...”

He trails off, seemingly unable to speak his fears out loud.

“What do you mean, ‘Minutemen’?” Danny asks, and he stares at her for a moment, looking somewhat perplexed.

“The Minutemen? ‘Protect the people at a minute’s notice’?” he offers, and Danny looks at him blankly. “You two must not be from around here.”

“... No,” she says finally. “We’re not.”

  


While Danny and Preston make plans for if more raiders come, Ari sits with the man called Jun and lets him look over her leg. He seems like a nice man, though his... wife, probably, is sort of rude. Sad, but nice. His dark hair hangs unkempt over his sallow face and in need of a thorough combing. And a trim.

“So, you...” Ari begins in halting and awkward English, and he looks up at her, “You from where?”

“We... we used to live in Quincy.”

“That is where?” Ari asks, “We from... very far away.”

“It's... south of the city. Used to be a... a real nice place. Safe,” he says sadly, with difficulty, and Ari stays quiet. “Marcy and I, we lived there with my parents and... and our son. But then the Gunners came, and...”

Ari suddenly realizes what’s happened to these people and understands why Marcy is so unpleasant.

“He was so young. He just... he had just turned 8 a month ago, and he...”

Jun trails off, letting out a shuddering breath and squeezing his eyes shut tightly, and he’s silent for a long moment before speaking again.

“I can’t. I’m... I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“It... it is okay,” she says gently, and they sit in heavy silence for another long moment, in small part because Ari can’t think of all the English words she wants to say. “Danny lose her husbands and son before, also. One die. Baby and other husband... soekra'n... uh, stolen, a small time before. My, uh.... English word is what? For son of sister.”

“Nephew,” he says, and she nods as he takes a needle and thread out of the medical kit.

“My nephew. Shaun. Danny cannot... carry?” Ari says, putting a hand on her stomach to make herself clear, “I carry Shaun. He was good baby. Never give me sick.”

“... Stolen? Do you mean kidnapped?”

“Yes, that,” she says, and he gives her a sympathetic frown. “We look for them.”

Jun nods, falling silent, and Ari stays quiet for a moment before changing the subject.

“Marcy. Your wife?”

“Yeah, Marcy and I have been married for... almost five years,” he says, and Ari tenses as her brings the needle down towards the bandage. He tucks the point of it into the fabric, and when it pokes out an inch away from its entry without touching her skin, she relaxes a bit. “Don’t like needles?”

“... No.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve had lots of practice,” he says quietly, almost sadly, and he’s silent for a moment before he speaks again in a low voice. “I’m sorry if Marcy has been... well, kind of mean. She’s not dealing with any of this very well.”

“Danny is that, also. Angry,” Ari responds in kind, struggling to get her thoughts across in what little English she speaks, “She... ji’ta’s E’nga’se, she... she is new now? Angry. I am sad, also. But she is now sad and angry. She will not... English word is what... for good sad?”

Jun furrows his eyebrows.

“I don’t... what do you mean?”

“Sad... for heal. Make pain small.”

“... Grieve?”

“ _Grieve_? Yes, maybe. She not... grieve. I hear her... her sleep fear? She refuse talk to me. She is angry. I hurt because I see this.”

Jun seems to understand her well enough for sympathy to show on his face, and he looks back down at the bandage on Ari’s leg.

“I... I know how that feels,” Jun replies, and they lapse into silence as he finishes sewing the bandage.

On the far end of the room, Danny and Preston continue to talk quietly. Danny has her arms crossed over her chest, Preston gesturing vaguely with his hands now that his rifle is slung over his shoulder.

“We leave soon?” Ari says, and Jun shrugs.

“With you too injured to really walk, we’ll probably have to stay at least a day or two,” he says, sighing. “Wish we had more food. We ran out this morning.”

Ari needs a minute to process this, but then she smiles broadly.

“Food? We have food!” She lifts her pack from the floor, frowning as it drips from the stimpaks. “They are... wet? But in cans. Still good.”

Jun watches with wide eyes as she takes can after can out of her bag, handing them to him.

“Ari!” Danny calls from across the room, abruptly leaving her conversation with Preston to move to the couch. “Tse’k ka’ onu no ha’we’? Tsa’egu te’ no. Mi’re’n-chu no pa’ oluto.”

“Komo... Dede, pa’ hu no ykoa’m,” Ari replies, holding up a can of peaches and gesturing towards Jun. “De’ tsumer-”

She’s suddenly interrupted by a spatter of gunshots from outside, and every head in the room turns to look at the double doors that lead out to the balcony.

“... They’re back,” Preston says from across the room, and then looks to Danny. “I’ll cover you while you go get the fusion core.”

Danny moves towards the door into the body of the museum but Ari calls out to get their attention.

“Koa! Fusion core? I have! I take before from... mroda’zu. Big power box?” she says, stumbling through the English as she reaches into her bag to withdraw the fusion core. “You need it?”

“Generator,” Danny corrects, and Ari nods, holding out the fusion core to Preston as he and Danny approach her.

“I take it before. In the... the low floor?”

“Basement?” Preston offers before Danny can respond, and as he looks at the fusion core Danny gives him a suspicious sidelong glance.

“Yes. Basement,” Ari says.

“How’s your leg doing?” Preston asks, and Ari smiles.

“Leg is better. Jun help.”

“... Good,” Danny says, switching to A’yute’ as Preston takes the fusion core back to Sturges and lifting Ari in her arms. “I’m going to move you behind the desk in the corner. Keep my pack with you. God and the Mother willing, the raiders will not make it in here, but if they do you can at least give them a nasty surprise.”

Just as she’s setting Ari down behind the desk, a voice rises from the street outside. Preston turns to look, taking a step towards the door before Danny stops him.

“I’ll go. Just get things ready.”

Preston looks worried, but nods.

“... Good luck.”

  


Danny steps out onto the balcony.

Below her in the street stands half a dozen people, and she gives each of them a quick glance before focusing her attention on the one in the middle. He’s wearing heavy armor that looks like it was made from scrap metal and the man beside him is holding up a lantern so the face of the man in armor can be seen.

When he doesn’t speak, Danny begins.

“... You must be Gristle.”

“And you must be the bitch that killed my men.” He lights a cigarette, crossing his arms over his chest. “Thanks for lettin’ Haybrook here go. He told me _all_ about you.”

A man steps into the light beside him, the orange glow of the lantern illuminating a pale face with a stripe of black greasepaint across the forehead.

Stupid. She knew it had been too easy.

She won’t make that mistake again in the future.

“You got two choices here. You surrender, and we’ll kill you quick, or you don’t surrender, and we make it last.”

“I see three. Those two that you mentioned, and the third. We leave.”

“Hah! How do you plan on makin’ that happen, sweetheart? You wanna make a _deal_?” He laughs again, and a few of his subordinates laugh, too.

Danny lets this settle into silence before speaking again.

“How many caps do you want to make this problem go away?”

This seems to interest him, and he turns to the man beside him to discuss it, his voice too quiet for Danny to hear. After a few minutes, he turns back to face her.

“... You give me six thousand caps, and you and your pals can walk outta here.”

“I will speak to them.”

Danny goes back in through the door, shutting it behind herself and lighting a cigarette.

“We don’t have six thousand caps, lady,” Marcy says curtly.

“I know that,” Danny responds, and goes back to her cigarette. By the time she’s done, both Preston and Sturges are back, Preston in the power armor and Sturges loading the minigun from the roof.

She steps back out onto the balcony to find Gristle looking somewhat angry.

“It’s about goddamn time. Where’s my caps?”

“We don’t have enough, but we can give you other things. Drugs, bullets. Everything we have.”

Gristle speaks quietly with the man beside him again and then grins up at her.

“... Alright. Come on down to the front doors with all your stuff, and we’ll have a talk.”

Danny can’t tell if he’s lying, but it doesn’t matter. All she really had to do was distract them long enough for Preston and Sturges to get the plan ready.

  


A few minutes later, she stands by the museum’s front doors with the minigun on the floor beside her, wearing dark clothes she took from one of the corpses over her vault suit and making final adjustments to the minigun while she waits for Preston’s signal.

Slowly, she opens the front door of the museum just a crack, looking out into the darkness to find only one man. At the moment he isn’t facing the museum, but she doesn’t wait for him to turn back before quietly shutting the door.

Upstairs, she hears someone give a quiet whistle.

Preston is ready.

Danny picks up the minigun and moves along the wall away from the door, then returns with her own whistle.

Just outside the door, something hits the street with a clatter, and after a few seconds it’s followed by an explosion that blows both doors off their hinges.

After another explosion further down the street, Danny moves out towards the alley she and Ari came through earlier in the day. Right on cue, Preston chucks the molotovs one after another out into the dark, and the street ahead explodes into fire and light.

Raiders come running out into the street, some on fire, some trying to put out the fires, some shouting. A car down the street catches fire and then explodes, the shockwave tossing two nearby raiders into a wall and setting several more buildings ablaze.

It’s amazing what a little fire can do.

Amidst the chaos, Danny sneaks into the alley with the minigun, and when she reaches a cross-alley that opens out onto the main road, she turns into it and starts towards the street.

Suddenly something grabs her hair from behind, pulling her long braid from its bun and dragging her over backwards. The minigun slips out of her grasp and as she struggles to stay on her feet, something sharp briefly jabs against her thigh.

A hand rises up in the left side of her vision, a bloodied knife aimed for her neck, and Danny reaches up with both hands and grasps the wrist of her attacker. She is much stronger than they are, and after a brief struggle from whoever has her by the hair she twists her body sideways until she’s facing the ground, the arm and body of her assailant, a masked, shirtless man with a dripping knife in his free hand, twisting along with her. With his wrist still in her hand, she throws him off his feet and brings her boot down on his elbow, breaking the joint. The man screams, and she brings the heel of her boot down on the side of his face with such force the she can hear his neck break with the impact.

As she stands there and pants, a dull ache begins in her thigh that she ignores in favor of picking the minigun back up and heading out into the still-flaming street.

Almost no one sees her soon enough to defend themselves. Danny mows down raiders, letting up only long enough to take three grenades from within her jacket one by one, pull the pins out with her teeth, and throw them into storefronts and behind sandbag barriers. Out near the end of the street, she can see Gristle giving orders in the lantern-carrying man’s light, a gun that looks like it might be a rifle in his hands.

With rising cacophony around her, bullets and explosions and screams, it’s hard to concentrate on anything other than the rattling of the gun in her hands, but every so often she can hear a bullet whistle past her ears, and twice she feels them. One in the fat of her arm, another in the meat of her thigh. She barely notices them past knowing they’re there, her heart thudding like festival drums in her ears and chest and throat, her fingers tingling and numb from the vibration of the minigun.

As she moves down the street away from the museum, she hears the sound of metal grinding against metal, and after another moment a sewer grating suddenly comes flipping out onto the fire-lit asphalt.

From the sewer below, a massive, dark shape emerges onto the street.

Danny stops firing and the world goes quiet around her, every step of the thing in the dark sending tremors through the ground.

A bone-shaking roar splits the silence before a raider screams nearby.

“ _Deathclaw!_ ”

The raiders near Danny scatter, screaming. Danny throws the only molotov she has towards the hulking thing at the end of the street.

When the fire spreads out and lights it up, Danny nearly faints.

God above, that’s a _fucking dinosaur._

The thing is fifteen feet tall and looks like it came directly out of someone’s nightmares, covered in scales and topped with a massive, toothy maw and long, curved horns. Before Gristle can get far enough away, it lunges and picks him up in one clawed hand and throws him against a wall, leaving him motionless on the ground.

Danny runs for the nearest storefront, hoping that the nearby raiders shooting at it will keep it distracted, and ducks behind a shop counter. There are screams outside and in the distance, and the deathclaw’s massive footfalls rumble up through the floor as it chases people down outside. Danny pants, chest heaving from exhaustion and adrenaline, her frightened heart beating heavy in her throat.

One by one, the voices outside go quiet, and Danny stays crouched behind the counter.

For a few minutes, there’s nothing but silence.

And then the footsteps come back, getting louder with each passing moment, and Danny swears under her breath and loads a new strip of ammunition into the minigun.

Glass crunches out in front of the shop, and the deathclaw snorts and sniffs the air. Danny risks a glance up over the counter to see if it’s found her.

When she sees it, it sees her, and she watches it there in the quiet dark for a long moment.

Maybe it will leave.

Maybe it’s had its fill on raiders and doesn’t want anything to do with her.

Danny stands slowly, minigun in her hands, shuffling slowly towards the nearby staircase.

“That’s it. Good... deathclaw,” she murmurs in English, only a few meters away from the steps, “Stay.... stay right there.”

The deathclaw roars.

It pulls its massive body through the open window of the storefront, the ceiling cracking as its back presses up against the plaster, and Danny starts the minigun and runs for the stairs.

She makes it two steps up before it lunges but it misses, and she makes just past the bend halfway up before it lunges again and knocks her feet out from under her. Danny rolls over, firing blindly at the open bottom of the stairs, and the deathclaw tries to squeeze its massive body between the walls that enclose the top half of the stairs.

It reaches out its hand, trying to knock the minigun away so it can get to her, and its claws rake across Danny’s face, chest, and shoulder.

Danny screams.

The deathclaw roars again, and Danny shuts her eyes and holds down the trigger until there are no bullets left.

  


Danny lies on the stairs, holding down the trigger of the depleted minigun, and sucks in frantic, heaving breaths.

First Mother and God above.

She’s never been so tired in all her life. As she lies there on the stairs, her neck, face, and torso wet and sticky with blood, she shuts her eyes and lets the coolness of the night wash over her. The wounds the deathclaw left are agonizing and there’s a growing pain in her left thigh.

And yet... she’s never felt so _alive_. Life rings in her ears, thrums in her veins, hums in the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. It’s as if until now she had been held down by weights, forced to hold herself back, and now she’s finally free.

But Danny loved her old life. Her friends, her parents, her family, her home, her job. She didn’t have any complaints or regrets before all this.

... Did she?

It’s an uncomfortable line of thought that brings feelings the frighten her to the surface, and she chooses to bury it and let it come back later.

After a long, long time, she staggers to her feet and climbs slowly over the deathclaw’s body, leaving the minigun on the stairs.

Down the street, she can hear Preston calling her name, but as she limps out into the road she hears movement off near the other side of the street and elects to follow it.

Danny takes out her pistol and shuffles towards the sounds to see Gristle dragging himself across the ground towards what looks like a backpack, both of his legs badly broken, his fingers clutching at cracks in the asphalt to pull his useless lower body along.

When he hears her approaching, he turns over with a groan, and Danny can see a white shard of bone in his left leg jutting out from the skin.

“How the _fuck_ are you still alive?” he growls in English, scuffling backwards away from her as she advances on him.

Danny doesn’t respond.

“I dunno who the fuck you are, vaultie, but nobody fucks with Keyser’s gangs. You’re in for a world of pain.”

He reaches for a discarded gun on the ground nearby and Danny brings the heel of her boot down on his broken leg.

Gristle screams.

“You don’t know what pain is,” Danny replies, tucking her pistol into her pocket and withdrawing her knife with shaking, white-knuckled hands as she stands over him. “Allow me to show you.”

She can still hear his screams in her ears long after he’s dead.

  


When the screams finally stop, silence falls on the dark street below. A few fires still burn in the shells of cars and storefronts, but they do little to brighten the darkness.

Preston stands up on the balcony, laser musket in his hands, waiting for North to call back that she’s okay, that the raiders are all gone, that the deathclaw is dead, _something_ that will assure him that she made it through that mess okay, but receives no response but silence.

“North!” he calls again, and inside he can hear Jun speaking to a frantic Ari, trying to calm her. “ _North!_ ”

Out ahead, 100 yards down the road, a figure passes through the light of a fire and back into darkness. They pass another fire, still too distant to be clearly seen, and Preston readies his gun.

“Who’s out there?” he calls, but all he can hear is the crackling of fires.

The figure emerges into the glow from a car fire, and Preston lowers his rifle with a sigh of relief when he can see that it’s North.

As the moments pass and she draws closer, Preston begins to make out details. The new pack on her back comes first, then the limp, and then... an alarming amount of blood.

“North!”

Preston pushes away from the railing, Sturges’ voice following him as he moves through the room and out the door.

“What’s goin’ on, Preston?”

Preston doesn’t have time to respond, already running across the walkway, down the stairs, through the offices, and all the way out to the front doors to meet North just as she reaches the steps.

Her face has been torn open, probably by the deathclaw, blood pouring from the long wounds across her face, shoulder, and chest. More blood seeps from bullet wounds in her thigh and arm, almost unnoticeable among the rest of her wounds but just as frightening.

How is she still standing?

“Preston,” she says, with an unsettling calm in her voice, and when he meets her eyes he finds an unexpected hardness in them, “I have taken care of the raiders.”

She starts up the steps but stumbles, and Preston reaches out to take her arm, helping her hobble up each one. She’s shaking badly, and she finds his forearm with her hand and grips it tight.

There isn't really any indication of her pain on her face, just tired anger, like she’s been woken up too early, right in the middle of a really good dream.

“And the deathclaw,” North adds, almost as if she’d forgotten about it, and her voice takes on a tinge that betrays the pain she must be feeling, “I... I need to lie down.”

Sturges has to be called to get her up into the office where the others wait, but they eventually make it.

“There... there are stimpaks and other supplies in... in the backpack,” North says as they lie her down on the couch where her sister laid only two hours ago. “It would have been inefficient to leave them behind before coming back.”

Ari is beside herself, shouting in her native language and throwing balled up papers and books at people until they move her from behind the desk. As Jun sits her down in a chair near her sister, Ari chucks an empty tin can at North and erupts into an angry torrent of what Preston assumes are expletives in their native language.

“Ari... Ari, uga’de, cha’ta’li’ga’zo,” North says gently, and reaches out and rests a bloodied hand on Ari’s knee, silencing her. With this, Ari bursts into tears, clutching at North’s hand with her own and crying quietly.

“Ji’ta’s zuka’lo,” Ari blubbers, and to Preston’s surprise North’s mouth curls up into something that resembles a smile. “Ji’ta’s wa’ta’ke zuka’lo.”

“Me’ guwe’ka’ ne’ cha’ta’li’ga’zo,” Danny replies heavily, giving Ari’s hand a squeeze, and Ari lets out a few weak laughs.

“A'ya'n,” Ari says quietly.

“... A’di’ ybuta’ no. De’ uma’ya’... hu na’ ybuta’.”

  


Later, Preston stands out on the balcony with North, sharing a cigarette with her in the first wash of sunrise. She still seems a bit woozy from the stimpaks, med-x, and the abuses she’s put herself through over the course of the night, but she’s otherwise fully recovered.

Probably still needs some sleep, though. Preston could use a nap himself, but they still have to get to Sanctuary.

... Sanctuary. He hopes it’s what Mama made it out to be.

“Ari seems to have settled down,” Preston offers. “Sleeping, last I checked.”

North hums noncommittally in reply, taking a long drag from their shared cigarette before handing it back to him. With her newly-free hand, she reaches up to run her fingers over her fresh scars, a slight frown playing across her lips for a moment before fading away.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, not really expecting a straight or thorough answer, and North takes a deep breath, letting it out slow.

“... Tired. Immeasurably so.”

After this, silence falls between them, Preston unsure what to say and North apparently not in the mood for conversation. Her face is removed of all expression, her unfocused gaze set somewhere off in the distance, and as he hands the cigarette back to her, she glances down at the road in front of the museum.

For a brief moment, Preston thinks he might have seen something like fear on her face, but the expression is gone almost before it even showed up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me' uma'ya' no onso to. La'm no se'he. - I'll deal with this. Stay quiet.  
> A'ya'n. - Okay  
> Ke a'n opogra' no me', ka' tu muza'r-fu oka'ra' a'n. - If he hurts me, you can easily kill him.  
> soekra'n - kidnap  
> ji'ta's E'nga'se - fucking English  
> Tse’k ka’ onu no ha’we’? Tsa’egu te’ no. Mi’re’n-chu no pa’ oluto. - What are you doing? Put those away. Don't let them see.  
> Komo... Dede, pa’ hu no ykoa’m - But... Ded, they're hungry  
> De' tsumer- - We have-  
> koa! - hey!  
> mroda'zu - generator  
> Ari... Ari, uga’de, cha’ta’li’ga’zo - Ari... Ari, please, shut the fuck up  
> Ji’ta’s zuka’lo - fucking idiot  
> Ji'ta's wa'ta'ke zuka'lo - fucking stupid idiot  
> Me’ guwe’ka’ ne’ cha’ta’li’ga’zo - I told you to shut up  
> A'ya'n - Yeah  
> A'di' ybuta' no. De' uma'ya'... hu na' ybuta'. - It's okay. We're going... to be okay.
> 
> \----------------------------------------------
> 
> hoo boy some SHIT went down in my gd life like
> 
> everything just happens so much??????????? i'm in hell
> 
> anyways have this  
> as always, come drop by my tumblr if you want to say words at me  
> wasteland-dan.tumblr.com


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